In a rare insight into what lay hidden behind his quiet persona, Steve Wright has described himself as a "placid person" who tended to bury anger "deep inside".

He admitted, in a letter to his father written while on remand in prison, that this was an "unhealthy" trait, but one that had stemmed from seeing enough "anger and violence in my childhood to last anyone a lifetime".

Born in April 1958 in Erpingham, Norfolk, Wright was the second of four children of his RAF policeman father, Conrad, and his mother, Patricia, a veterinary nurse. His unsettled upbringing began in West Beckham, Norfolk, and the family was constantly moving around the world to wherever his father was stationed. They lived in Malta and Singapore. But he would also stay with grandparents in Friston, near Saxmundham.

His parents' rocky marriage ended in a bitter split in the 1960s when Wright was still a child. Both remarried and his father and his new wife, Valerie, went on to have two more children, Keith and Natalie.

Conrad Wright, 72, told the Guardian that his ex-wife abandoned them, leaving Wright always searching for a mother figure. But his mother, Patricia, who now lives in San Diego, California, claimed in an interview in the News of the World that she was forced to leave because the marriage had grown violent. She said that she had wanted to take the children, and that Steve was afraid of his father, but was prevented from doing so.

Whatever the truth, Wright and his siblings, David, Jeanette and Tina, did not get on with his father's new wife, which led to further family rifts. He grew up into a shy young man who had difficulty with long-term relationships and holding down a job, and he developed a propensity to get into debt.

He left school at 16 with no qualifications and, after a job as a waiter in a hotel, joined the merchant navy, to work as a chef on ferries sailing out of Felixstowe. His first marriage to Angela O'Donovan, in 1978 in Milford Haven, produced a son, Michael, but it ended after eight years and he moved on.

As an adult, he was to repeat the pattern of his childhood, never settling for long in one place, on indeed one job, and has been variously employed as a dock worker, lorry driver, barman, pub landlord, fork-lift truck driver and as a steward on the QE2.

It was while on shore-leave trips abroad during his six years on the QE2 that he began using prostitutes. It was also on board the ship he met Diane Cassell, a window dresser for one of the shops, who would become his second wife. They left the QE2 to run a Norwich pub together, the Ferry Boat Inn, in the city's red-light district. The couple wed in 1987, when the brewers insisted they needed to be married to run the place. But it was a "disaster", according to his former wife, now Diane Cole, 53, and they split up within a year.

"I don't want to say too much but our marriage wasn't great. It wasn't good and I was glad when it ended," she told the Hartlepool Gazette.

Wright's tenancy of the Ferry Boat Inn, which was a haunt for prostitutes in the 1980s and 1990s, lasted five months, from May until September 1988. A year after the split, Wright struck up a relationship with Sarah Whiteley, a barmaid in the White Horse pub in Chislehurst he was running. They moved to Plumstead to run the Rose in Crown pub in 1990 and had a daughter together in 1992. But that relationship, too, foundered and they split up before the baby's first birthday. Whiteley told the News of the World that Wright lost his pub landlord job because of his gambling and drinking.

His mother, Patricia, who was reunited with Wright when she flew over for a Christmas visit in 1992, revealed that he fell out with her in a drunken rage. She said they had got on well, but before she left, her quiet son "changed completely" and left a "terrible, drunken message" on her phone. "It was F- this and F that" she told News of the World. "If he could say those terrible things he obviously didn't want anything to do with me."

Suicide attempts

During Wright's time in London, he began to visit massage parlours for sex, a habit he retained when he eventually moved back to Suffolk. By the mid-1990s, his constant gambling had taken its toll and, unable to see a way out of his spiralling debts, he tried to commit suicide by gassing himself in his car. He was found lying in an alley in Haverhill, Suffolk, and taken to hospital.

Whiteley received a suicide note from her former boyfriend around this time. "He said he missed his daughter, he didn't want to be a part-time dad and had lost everything," she said.

It was the first of two suicide attempts, which his step-brother Keith said were brought on by debts, a recurring problem. He was recently declared bankrupt after running up £30,000 in unsecured loans.

Keith, a tug driver, said the incident had a profound effect on Wright. "He went a bit quiet. Before that, he used to be quite outgoing. He would go for a beer and a laugh and a joke but then it was hard to get much out of him."

His second suicide attempt came in 2000, with an overdose of pills after he returned from a 10-week trip to Thailand, where again, he had ended up in debt after "some girl scammed him for everything he had" according to Keith. He had sold all his possessions, including his car and furniture, to fund the trip during which he once again enjoyed the services of foreign prostitutes.

Wright moved back in with his father and stepmother in Felixstowe for a while, where he met Pamela Wright, his current partner (their shared surname is a coincidence), and they moved in together in 2001. He was a member of Seckford golf club, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, and of the Brigands (the Brook Residents International Golf and Notable Delinquents Society) club, based at the hotel, where he worked for a few months as a publican and was remembered as a dapper dresser, who always played in black.

Later that year, he signed on for driving and labouring jobs with Gateway Recruitment Agency, first based in Levington and then Nacton, close to where Anneli Alderton's body was found.

Wright admitted in court he was familiar with the road where Alderton's body was found as he had driven down it numerous times. He was also aware of the geography of the area in Hintlesham, where Gemma Adams was found, because he had used it while working in nearby Hadleigh. He knew the Old Felixtowe Road in Levington, where the bodies of Annette Nichols and Paula Clennell were found, he said, but he denied any knowledge of the Copdock area where the body of Tania Nicol was deposited.

He said that he stopped going to massage parlours when he met Pamela and described their relationship as "pretty good" but six months after they moved to Bell Close in Ipswich, in 2004, he began again. He would visit Cleopatras and Oasis after golf on a Saturday or "when I got the urge", he said.

But by October 2006, he had discovered he could buy sex for as little as £20 from the drug-addicted and vulnerable women on the streets near his home. One woman working as a prostitute in Ipswich, who said she had sex with Wright three days after the fifth victim was found, said he was a regular whom the women felt safe with. But that night, December 18 2006, the 31-year-old woman, known as Kiera, said he had changed and turned "nasty".

"He pinned me down, He never used to do that. It did scare me when he did it because it wasn't like him. He was a bit nasty."

Kiera said: "When I heard he had been charged, I thought 'Oh my God, I've been in his house. He could've done anything.' I never thought it would be him. I thought it would be someone from another country, or just a maniac."